“ T E A C H I N G A T A U N I V E R S I T Y O F A CERTAIN SORT” E D U C A T I O N A T T H E UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO OVER THE PAST CENTURY J o h n W . B o y e r OCCASIONAL PAPERS O N H I G H E R EDUCATION XXI XXITHE COLLEGE O F T H E UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Ralph W. Tyler, Chief Examiner, Board of Examinations, 1938 –1953 “TEACHING AT A UNIVERSITY O F A C E R T A I N S O R T ” Education at the University of Chicago over the Past Century INTRODUCTION he College begins this academic year with slightly more than 5,300 students. Our first-year class of 1,416 stu- T dents plus 42 transfer students will sustain the College at its current size. The talent, creativity, and ambition of our students; the extraordinary pool of applicants from which they were chosen; and their eagerness to participate with all of us in the en- terprise of learning at the College should make us confident that the academic year that is just underway will be stimulating and rewarding. The Admissions data we have heard today are one of several ways to measure the achievements of our students. We might also cite the schol- arships and fellowships they have won in the past decade—including 14 Rhodes Scholarships, 117 Fulbrights, and 36 Goldwaters. Less familiar names are also on the list: In 2011 two students won Woodrow Wilson– Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellowships for Aspiring Teachers of Color, supporting enrollment in graduate education programs that lead to a master’s degree and teaching certification; and a third student won a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Arts Award, supporting three years of This essay was originally presented as the Annual Report to the Faculty of the College on October 18, 2011. John W. Boyer is the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History and the College, and Dean of the College. “TEACHING AT A UNIVERSITY OF A CERTAIN SORT” 2 study at an accredited graduate institution by a student with exceptional artistic or creative promise and significant financial need. Less public measures of the excellence of our students and the quality of the education we offer them might include the more than 100 students who competed successfully for Foreign Language Acquisition Grants to support intermediate and advanced study of languages other than English in summer 2011 or the many more who undertook B.A. research, won departmental honors, or participated in faculty research laboratories as independent inquirers or as co-authors of papers. How we describe and how we measure the quality of a Chicago education is a complex question. How we settle that question, and even how and why we raise it to begin with, is a matter of intense internal debate and significant public debate as well. These issues have a history, of course, and it is a history that bears upon the very identity of our university as a teaching and research institution. I want to speak about several important elements of that history today. Before turning to that I want to mention another very current and very public way in which some claim to take the measure of our university. Perhaps you have heard that we began this academic year in a tie for fifth place in the U.S. News rankings. We are in worthy company in the top five, although we ought to be higher than some, and while we do not manage the College for the sake of these rankings we can allow ourselves to be gratified to have the University of Chicago publicly acknowledged in this way. You might have noticed two additional rankings this year—the Times Higher Education World University Rankings published in London at the beginning of this month, and the Academic Ranking of World Universities published in Shanghai last spring. We are number nine in Shanghai and also number nine in London. The American universities 3 JOHN W. BOYER ahead of us are Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, and Berkeley according to Shanghai; and Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and Princeton, according to London. You will not be surprised to learn that Oxford and Cambridge rank ahead of us in London, as does the Imperial College London. But only Cambridge is ahead of us in Shanghai, where Oxford is tenth. Now compare the list in U.S. News: ahead of us are Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia; sharing fifth place are Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Penn, and Chicago. These lists are remarkably uniform, remarkably familiar, and remark- ably American. There are some local favorites, of course, but Chicago is no one’s local favorite, and I think we need not (at least among ourselves) resist our midwestern impulse to claim that Chicago at least is highly ranked around the world on its merits and not on mere fame. We know very well that if some editor somewhere created a method for ranking universities and Harvard did not come out near the top, that editor would not celebrate a new discovery but would instead throw out his method and start again. So let us conclude that around the world, according to more than one unscientific and perhaps somewhat arbitrary set of measurements, we number among the best. We are having, as the Washington Post’s higher education columnist Daniel de Vise has said, “a banner year in the rankings.” How shall we understand our “banner year”? The U.S. News rank- ings depend on a wide variety of measures. Among these are selectivity, financial resources, class size, graduation and retention rates, alumni giving, and reputation among high school counselors. By all of those measures we are well ahead of where we were a decade ago, when we ranked as low as 17th in the U.S. News poll. The investments made in the College in recent years have had sound academic motives; happily they have also benefitted us in the U.S. News rankings. “TEACHING AT A UNIVERSITY OF A CERTAIN SORT” 4 For example, the extraordinary work of the Office of College Admissions, making a persuasive case for a Chicago education to the best students at the best high schools in the nation and internationally, has increased, as we well know, both the number and the academic quality of our applicants and matriculants. There is no good reason to value selectivity by itself, but the College becomes more selective when we attempt to reach out to the best students and persuade them to apply and then to attend. Over the same period we have seen our first-year retention rates and our graduation rates rise to levels equal to those of our Ivy League peers—powerful evidence that we have the right students and that they are getting what they came for. The editors at U.S. News are assiduous counters; while they count applicants, matriculants, and graduates, they also count students in classrooms, and we have a sub- stantial number of small classes and a high ratio of faculty to students —expensive practices, but practices that are essential to our academic mission. Behind the numbers are both venerable traditions and newer initiatives: The rigor of our Core, the intellectual integrity of our majors, the intelligence and the attractiveness of our Study Abroad programs, the growing number of research opportunities for students in all fields, the careful advising offered by the Dean of Students in the College, the hundreds of Metcalf Internships and the many other services offered by Career Advising and Placement Services—each of these counts for the College as an element that makes the quality of what we do evident to the students who apply, to the alumni who give gifts, and to the high school counselors who advise our applicants and also plays a role in the public rankings created by U.S. News. The U.S. News rankings are embedded in the American undergrad- uate context. They are a commercial enterprise, and a very successful one 5 JOHN W. BOYER for the magazine, designed to persuade consumers that it is worth their money to buy the publication and use it to guide the very complex and very costly decision that students and their families make about a college education. The international rankings are somewhat different. They are less interested in undergraduate admissions or in the undergraduate education that is so vital to the cultural and financial well-being of American universities. Their methods are more focused on research pro- ductivity among the faculty. There can be no doubt of our faculty’s status in the global academic world as a body of research scholars, and we need not be surprised by our place in the academic world as measured from London and Shanghai. The Shanghai poll uses Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, highly cited research, and a few other measures to create its list. The London poll is quite similar, but adds ratios of faculty size to student body and other measures to stand as proxy for the “quality of education.” The London group is explicit about the mutually reinforcing relationship among graduate education, the quality of the faculty, the rigor and quality of the undergraduate experience, and the overall quality of a university. In other words, in its methodology London makes an effort to look beyond research productivity to the graduate and undergraduate educational enterprises. Undergraduate education, graduate education, research and scholar- ship are all, of course, important parts of what we do.
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